Former Yankees OF Williams reinventing himself as a musician

Williams won an American League batting title and four World Series in 16 seasons as an outfielder for the New York Yankees.

"Even though there's a lot of people who do baseball for the rest of their lives and they're involved in the game one way or another, I think of those terms when I think of music," Williams said Monday at Friendship Tech Prep Academy, where he was part of a musical education day run by the National Association of Music Merchants.

During three years at the Manhattan School of Music, Williams studied theory, history and political and social impacts and the question, "Why do you play music?"

Williams attended Escuela Libre de Musica, a performing arts high school in his native Puerto Rico, but that wasn't enough of an education for the son of a teacher.

Williams looks at Beethoven and Mozart and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong the way he used to admire Roberto Clemente and other Puerto Rican baseball players.

My exposure to music at an early age, I was able to develop the discipline and the work ethic and everything I had to do with learning this, and then I was able to apply it into my training becoming a baseball player.